Collapse Quotes In Thunderbird Email Client
Most email clients and services display quotes around the original email message when a user replies to an email.
These quotes list part or all of the original message, and may even contain the whole conversation if emails are sent back and forth multiple times.
Quotes are a good indicator of new and old content and can also be used to reread emails that have been part of the conversation without having to search for them in the inbox or send items folder.
But quotes can also increase the length of an email message. It may happen that quotes exceed the new message by a large factor.
QuoteCollapse for Thunderbird
QuoteCollapse for the Thunderbird email client offers a solution for this.
The Thunderbird add-on will automatically collapse all quotes in emails by default. The first line of the first quote is still displayed, and you can click on the plus icon on the left of it to expand all quotes to read past messages of the conversation again.
Holding down shift while clicking on the plus icon will expand all quotes whereas the CTRL key will expand all quotes of the same nesting level.
The developer of the add-on is offering customization information on the project website which can be used for example to change the style so that the first level of quotes are always expanded (and the rest is collapsed).
Collapse Quotes is available at the Mozilla projects website where it can be downloaded for all versions of Thunderbird.
Update: The extension works fine in recent versions of Thunderbird. I have tested it on a Thunderbird 31 installation and the quote collapsing worked just fine. The customization options on the other hand don't seem to work anymore which can be attributed to the work done on Thunderbird since the last update of the extension was released in 2012.
You may also be interested in the Toggle Quotes extension for Thunderbird. It adds a toolbar button and keyboard shortcut to QuoteCollapse to quickly toggle the display of quotes in emails in the email client.
As far as QuoteCollapse is concerned, the extension appears to have been abandoned by its author. The last update dates back to January of 2012, so don't expect any new updates for the extension unless someone forks it.
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!